Cloughed Up
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Portmeirion, Sarah Baylis, Yale University Press, 2026, 256 pages, £35.
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It is a century since the first purpose-built holiday village appeared above a coastal cwm at the feet of Eryri. In attempting to categorise Portmeirion, journalists have always lazily pointed to one of the Lakes at Como or Maggiore, but really it’s located somewhere between the whimsy of Vanburgh and the earthiness of Telford. In Jonah Jones’s words, Portmeirion is ‘a hotchpotch of Bavarian vernacular, Cornish weatherboard, Jacobean, Regency, Strawberry Hill Gothic, Victorian Gothic’ – anything but that dreaded epithet, ‘Italianate’. Arnold Rattenbury even detects a touch of Russian Orthodoxy in the original plans for the orotundly-titled Campinale, then just plain-Englishly labelled the ‘Bell Tower.’
It’s high time for a new Portmeirion title; the last major publication was a coffee-table confection released twenty years ago. And, lest we forget, Nikolaus Pevsner’s secretary, Richard Haslam, has been working on a critical appraisal of Clough’s oeuvre since at least the 1990s. It was with some scepticism that I approached Sarah Baylis’s Portmeirion: The Architecture of Pleasure – do we need another generalist book? While readers hoping for something with more scholarly heft may be disappointed, perhaps only a comprehensive survey celebrating Portmeirion’s survival of war, time itself and Covid could befit its centennial milestone.
This is Baylis’s first major publication. Armed with a glut of unpublished archival material, Baylis has shone a light on a number of twentieth-century characters who frequented Portmeirion and are ripe for rediscovery. At centre stage is of course the gentleman-architect himself, Major Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, KT. CBC. MC. LLD. FRIBA. FRTPI. FILA., etc. (1883–1978), or just ‘Clough’ to his friends. As much as his buildings, visitors came to snatch a glimpse of the man, who was invariably tricked out in dusty riding britches and Malvolian knitted stockings pulled up to the knees. Baylis writes with an easy rhythm that breezes through Portmeirion’s evolution from frigid backwater to exotic resort. Her writing does not mimic the ‘rococo’ style of the Squire of Portmeirion, but there are titillating moments Baylis ‘cloughs up’ her prose (the phrase of choice to describe the architect’s flourishes), such as when she notes dryly that a previous tenant, one Mrs Haigh, ‘was given, it was rumoured, to nude sun-worship’.
A self-styled ‘dancing man’, Clough was a regular at Edwardian balls, allowing him to make the connections that led to his initial commissions – an estate cottage here, a hall there – helped along the way by, in his own words, ‘family jobbery’. Clough claimed to only have ‘modest resources’ gleaned from his private architectural practice to build his childhood dream, Portmeirion, but he also had the serendipity of having an uncle who was selling a castle plus demesne just four miles from Plas Brondanw, the ancestral seat of the William-Ellises. In 1925 he snapped it up, spooked by the noises the castle trustees were making about turning it into a juvenile institution. Good news for folly fans, bad news for ‘delinquent youths of low intelligence’. In Clough’s defence, a decade earlier he had built Cumnor Rise in Oxfordshire, a ‘home for feeble-minded girls’. So there’s that.
Given that it was designed by a member of the gentry, it is perhaps no surprise that Portmeirion should cultivate a cloyingly cosy air. Its classical overtones make it a natural honeypot for the National Trust-sticker-toting Tories (I once spied Theresa May bustling by the hotel quay, Philip in tow). There is nothing new about its rarefied atmosphere; by design Portmeirion has been notoriously difficult to locate. ‘So far as the Ordnance Map is concerned,’ runs one smug advertisement from 1927, ‘Portmeirion does not really exist.’ In fact, its cartographic debut was on a Nazi intelligence report. Clough rather snootily envisioned it as ‘a holiday retreat for the more discerning’ and, according to his whim, jacked up the price of entry accordingly. As one Daily Mirror hack discovered in 1953, a notice advised ‘that visitors to Portmeirion may be sufficiently discouraged and so kept to acceptable numbers, a toll of 2s. per head has had to be imposed. To avoid it please turn back here—gently please.’ I’m reminded of my dad who, as a boy, was frogmarched across the Dwyryd estuary at low tide from Porthmadog by his father, bent on not paying the entrance fee – and my nain terrified that the tide would sweep them away.
Portmeirion not only bears the associative glamour of Noël Coward – famously he wrote Blithe Spirit here in a five day blitz in 1941 – but also the glamourie of improbable plants and pavilions. In the subtropical Gwyllt you’ll find that wildwood rhododendrons hover over a graveyard for dogs; Himalayan magnolias fringe a corrugated iron gloriette; and giant water lilies lie in the shadow of a pagoda à la japonaise. So much of Portmeirion’s plants and portholes, doorways and domes appear on the scale of a stage, or a child, or a dream. From afar the domes and spires seem to compete with the redwoods, yet as you get closer the proportions melt away like cream in a fruit fool. You are left with an aftertaste of forced perspective and rhubarb.
But, to use a Cloughism or two, for all its wobble, Portmeirion is no fribble. As well as fulfilling a boyhood fantasy of building a hillside village, Portmeirion was Clough’s propaganda piece, the culmination of a career spent campaigning against unchecked ‘bungaloid growth’ by pestering the local authorities. England and the Octopus was an early screed Clough penned against unregulated ribbon development destroying the countryside. Hard on its heels was an opportunity for him to edit a series of satirical and fantastically rude Cautionary Guides to towns including Oxford, which shamed councils for the dereliction of duty toward their amenities.
Portmeirion was his way of demonstrating that buildings needn’t spoil their surroundings, nor cost the earth. In fact, Clough demonstrated that they could be made from it. In Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay, he proposes the use of vernacular building methods and autochthonic materials to house Britain’s veterans in the face of post-war shortages (a technique for which his father-in-law was the chief revivalist). It was an obstacle he would come up against at Portmeirion in the 1950s in the wake of the Second World War, and he employed much the same solution. Sand and rammed earth were in liberal use, on top of more unorthodox materials: the posts supporting the cupola above the Pantheon’s dome were originally overpainted cardboard fabric tubes.
The semi-extemporal design and construction of Portmeirion, charming as it may be, made it vulnerable. And it was as if, when Clough died in 1978 at the age of ninety-four, whatever was keeping Portmeirion stuck together was threatening to come apart. The Hotel Portmeirion fire in 1981 was a traumatic incident that still stings in the memories of those who are alive to remember it. Not only did the conflagration gut the cockpit bar, which had been fashioned from the panelled interior of the HMS Arethusa, but it also destroyed an archive, collected over a two-year period, which was being kept in the hotel overnight for, erm, safekeeping before an ill-fated exhibition that was due to open the following day.
Recently a cache of singed newspaper clippings, letters, photographs and other ephemera that survived the fire came to light. The discovery, courtesy of Haslam, could not have come at a better moment for Sarah Baylis. Quite correctly, she makes room to mention the many queer guests at Portmeirion, welcomed by Portmeirion’s managers, Jim Wyllie and, later, Michael Trevor-Williams, both of whom were gay. Baylis includes a touching letter from Jan Morris, post-surgery, addressed to the maître d’, asking if she would still be welcome to visit in her ‘new persona’ (she was). As she has to squeeze in more than a hundred years into two hundred and fifty pages Baylis understandably cannot go into further detail, but given the importance of the queer creatives hosted here, there is surely enough material for a book in its own right.
Baylis draws a parallel between the queer haven and the architecture: ‘Portmeirion’s playful architecture is, after all, undeniably camp.’ But, as Susan Sontag teaches us, to use ‘camp’ as a synonym for ‘gay’ is misguided. In her classic essay Notes on ‘Camp’, Sontag explains the phenomenon as an aesthetic sensibility that isn’t considered ‘serious’ enough by its detractors; that is outlandishly ambitious; that is opera; that is eighteenth-century; that is ‘things-being-what-they-are-not;’ that ‘can be serious about the frivolousness’, and vice versa. What better indices are there to apply to Portmeirion? The only quality that does not comply with Sontag’s criteria – and perhaps the most essential for Portmeirion – is politics. Sontag avers controversially that camp is insouciantly ‘apolitical’, but Michael Bronski frames camp as a ‘re-imagining of the material world.’ Is it too far to say that Clough was also trying to reimagine the world by material means? After all, to ‘camp it up’ sounds awfully close to ‘clough up’.
An attempt is made to apportion Portmeirion’s permissive atmosphere to Amabel’s credentials as a Strachey, having ‘grown up in the progressive environment of Edwardian Bloomsbury’. But Amabel grew up in Newlands Corner in, um, Surrey. Perhaps Baylis uses ‘Bloomsbury’ to refer to the coterie as opposed to the place itself. But even then, Amabel grew up in a privileged household headed by John St Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator, who was, despite his Whiggish tendencies, against Lloyd George’s welfare reforms (Clough was to design the latter’s oval-shaped memorial at Llanystumdwy). Amabel reveals in her memoir, All Stracheys are Cousins, that Lytton Strachey, mainstay of the Bloomsbury Group, dismissed his first cousin’s ideas as ‘reactionary’ and ‘Spectatorial’. All Stracheys may be cousins, but not all Stracheys are progressive.
Again, another area that deserves its own book which Baylis can only touch on is Portmeirion’s relationship with the Modern Movement. Clough is so often collocated with Palladianism that his enthusiasm for other styles, modernism especially, is overlooked. The author claims that of all the modernist architects only Maxwell Fry expressed his admiration for Portmeirion, but then she adds that American Modernist Frank Lloyd Wright also gave it the nod sixty-odd pages later. And what about, in Rattenbury’s words, Clough’s ‘admiring friends’, and proponents of the Modern Movement: Jane Drew, Ove Arup, Lionel Esher, and Lewis Mumford? When the Southbank Centre received listed status earlier this year, The Spectator (which swapped evidence-based argument for polemic long after Strachey’s editorship) decried what they saw as the Left’s embrace of ugliness and disavowal of art for art’s sake. But this blinkered idea of beauty has emboldened neoclassical-conservative architects like Quinlan Terry to design Poundbury, for which the term ‘folly’ should not only be applied to the architecture but the entire endeavour. On the other hand, Clough lauded the freshly-opened Royal Festival Hall as ‘a fine piece of modern architecture […] purged of all purposeless conceits’. This tells you where his heart really lay: a modernist commitment to ‘fitness for purpose’ – a philosophy that likewise runs through Portmeirion, despite its bells and whistles. To mangle Wilfred Owen, the poetry is in the propaganda.
Looking at the 1925 draft plan for ‘Port Meirion’ again, I am struck anew at how enterprising and unlikely the whole folderol was. Ideologically as much as aesthetically, who else has been this brave with buildings? The subtitle to Baylis’s new publication, The Architecture of Pleasure, is meant to call to mind The Pleasures of Architecture, co-written by Clough and Amabel, which aimed to teach the public how to decipher between the good, the bad and the ugly. In a housing crisis of mould and cold, a book that reminds us that architecture has a duty to be beautifully fun and funnily beautiful can be no bad thing.
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O. J. Williams is a writer from the North West. He runs Anelog, a poetry press based in Oxford.
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